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Volhav writes "Like many as a child, the photographer Mark Meyer wondered what the difference between Yellow-Green and Green-Yellow was in that Crayola box of crayons. Using a monitor calibration tool and the Argyll 3rd party software he evaluated a box of 24 Crayola crayons, and plotted them out with sRGB values. He even included a nice printable poster size version of the chart in his blog post. For the geek or curious this was a pretty interesting plot."

Well then, I feel dumb. FWIW everyone else missed the typo too... if you tag a story typo it makes a jabber bot yell at me so I look harder at the text to find things like that.

Well damn. I was so used to Rob Malda's thick skin:-). If he ever felt dumb, he never told anyone so far as I know. No offense was really intended, just that Slashdot could really use a good copy editor sometimes. It would add that professional touch. I could do this. Typos like that practically leap out at me. I think the brains of most people unconsciously auto-correct things like that "box of" error and they don't easily notice. Mine does that too and the intent of the sentence is quite clear, o

Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets. I spent way too long in my youth, if I recall correctly, classifying iron ore samples using one. Its a fairly elegant technique because accurate ultra wide range light sensors have been old stuff for decades. It seems like I took an entire 200 level quantitative chemical analysis chemistry class where all we did was F around with a spectrophotometer in different ways.

If I recall correctly, the infrared ones were the cats meow before NMR got "cheap" for classifying organic compounds.

Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets.

Oh, be quiet and just enjoy nerding out for once in your life already.

Some of us nerd out by pointing out our superiority, thank you very much!

The nerding out bit is he could get dramatically better results using an even more ridiculously expensive tool, if he wanted to.

The standard/. car analogy is you can measure the even-ness of the gap between the door and body using a kids 75 cent wooden ruler to maybe as much as 2 sig figs, but a machinist could loan you a $250 digital dial caliper to get at around 3 sig figs, maybe 4.

I'm surprised no chemist out there has run this exact experiment... I know I'd be tempted if I was still in that field and h

Only the bottom end of the calibration gadgets for monitors use characterised colourimeters. Many of the medium and higher end monitor calibration gadgets are proper spectrophotometers. Typically many of the devices where one device is capable of doing the entire colour workflow from scanner to monitor to printer and compare them to pantone charts are the real deal. The i1 PhotoPro is also roughly 10x the cost of your run of the mill "monitor calibration gadgets" like the i1 Display.

You should not patent rounded corner rectangles Apple, here look my toe nails, they have rounded corners since the beginning of UNIX time, are your iPads edible? because I know my toenails are. Stop thwarting the freedom of the rounded rectangles with your sub-par implementations.

That reminds me of one of my very favorite old Peanuts cartoons:Lucy brings Linus a steaming mug, and says "I brought you a mug of hot cocoa."Linus tastes it and says "It tastes like hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it."Lucy tastes it and agrees, saying "You're right. I'll go add another crayon."

I think the better question is, has anyone designed and implemented a full-color plotter that uses a pack of crayons as the replacement plotting filiment? Or has anyone designed a full-color display that somehow uses a pack of (maybe mentled) crayons? Then the poster might actually be useful.

Not a plotter, but Tektronix did manufacture and sell a line of printers that melted a solid and spat it onto paper. Essentially, these "Phaser" printers used crayons. Xerox bought the printer line from Tektronix.

I work in color chemistry too. I'd like to get excited about this article but it just reminds me of work and I start wondering about what the variation is in the individual colors between different boxes, or what the difference is between these same colors in the markers from the same manufacturer.

"Using a monitor calibration tool and the Argyll 3rd party software he evaluated a box of 24 Crayola crayons..."

But...but... that's our secret recipe, just like Kentucky Fried Chicken (excuse me, KFC) or Coke (excuse me, Coca-Cola (Excuse Me, Coca-Cola Classic)). Now kids can just use it for free on the intertubes?!? And *no* royalties or renewables to parents to renew!!??!!??